Homeless man dies in emergency after waiting 34 hours with no treatment
Hi all,
Here's a link and a cut and paste of an article I noticed on CTV's website today. It made me wonder: definitely there is room for overall improvement in Canada's health care system, particularly with regard to wait times...but do people from different walks of life receive different level of care priority?
Be well everyone.
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Man dies after 34 hours in ER without getting treatment
Updated Tue. Sep. 23 2008 10:17 AM ET
ctvwinnipeg.ca
A Winnipeg man waited 34 hours in an emergency room this weekend, but died without getting treatment.
Sources tell CTV News he was homeless.
Last Friday at 3:00 p.m., the man walked into the emergency room at the Health Sciences Centre seeking treatment.
At 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning, staff found the man unconscious.
He was pronounced dead a short time later, after they tried to resuscitate him.
The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority (WRHA) won't release the man's name and they won't say what he came in for.
Unconfirmed reports also claim the man may have been dead for several hours before he was noticed by staff.
Those allegations will now be part of the review looking into the matter.
A critical incident review is underway involving the Health Sciences Centre, its emergency department, and the WRHA.
"It's a concern when something like that happens," WRHA spokesperson Heidi Graham told CTV News. "We want to review and find out, not pre-judge, what happened during those hours. But we are going to get to the bottom and find out what happened."
The WRHA wouldn't go any further, saying just that the review will identify what went wrong, and make recommendations of how things should be changed to prevent this from happening again.
But the Manitoba's Conservative health critic says there's no way it should have happened at all.
"I find this unbelievable. This is a horrible failure of our health care system," Myrna Driedger said. "We have been harping on the NDP government for many many years now, that we have a crisis in our ERs. We have been told numerous times by this government and by this premier that they are fixing it. This is not a fix of our health care system when a person dies in a waiting room."
With a report from CTV's Kelly Dehn.
I already posted that in news...
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good to see you on the site alex.
Hey Alexandra,like Janelle is saying,nice to see you check up on the sight and droping off news items.Plz stay connected..blessings..JH
This is so crazy that this happened. I cannot believe that nobody would give him treatment. I do not understand this at all. lawsuit zoloft
If this incident is real then the entire health care system is a big fail, sitting for 34 hours in a hospital and dying there because nobody came to see you is unacceptable. In rehab Florida hospitals people wait maximum 5 minutes before a nurse or doctor approaches them.
When I told my wife about this incident she did not believe it till I showed her this article, it`s like we live in a poor country from Africa. When I visited my brother in drug rehab centers Texas I felt like I was not a visitor but the health secretary, they were very kind with me explaining everything I wanted to know about my brothers health, a medic gave me some advices regarding my brothers drinking problem and I think that`s the last time when my brother will have to stay in this kind of hospitals.